I Saw Dasein

This is a bit off topic, but as I am enjoying Stellaris in a mild way I am thinking I would like to try EUIV. I'm a bit confused by all of the DLC and I have read some reviews suggesting the "base game" has become unplayable without the DLC. Is that right? Is there fun to be had in this game without investing hundreds of dollars into it?

Freedom was garbage but the Corrections was good... I at least liked the part about Chip, possible because I too am an early thirties white guy struggling with monotony etc. I read some cool books this summer: 1. I read some books my Julio Cortazar. I read a book of his short stories called "Blow-Up". Very good magical realist/weird latin American fiction. One of the stories is available online here. Obviously influenced a lot by Borges and (I think) French existentialists. Apparently Bolano liked him, and so does Vandermeer (The guy who wrote the Southern Reach books) and it shows. I also read one of his novels called "Hopscotch". It's basically an anti-novel. There's about 150 chapters presented more-or-less chronologically, but rather than reading it front to back there is also a set of instructions presenting an alternate course through the book. I have heard it is called the first hyperlink novel, which I don't really agree with, but it is extremely well written and cool. 2. I read "A brief history of portable literature" by Enrique Vilas-Matas, which was written in the 1960s or 70s but only recently translated. It's about a fictional avant-garde movement of artists/writers comprised of Marcel Duchamp, George O'Keefe, etc. Very short and absurdist. I liked it, but not as much as I thought I would? 3. I read "Gringos" on the recommendation of someone in this thread. I love Charles Portis and this one was for sure one of his best. His books always remind me of the Coen brothers for some reason, and this one was no exception. A weird rambling story of one man's search through Mexico for a mystical Aztec city....

I never read Gringos but I will definitely check it out... I kind of forgot about Charles Portis I am reading "So you've been publicly shamed" and its kind of manipulative and I think Jon Ronson is trolling at least a little. But I now do feel kind of bad for Jonah Lehrer.

if you live somewhere with bedbugs you purchase used sofas at your peril...

Seriously "Dog of the South" rules so much, Ray Midge is an Ignatious J. Reilly-level crank.

Well, to my knowledge Poland hasn't practiced imperialism, cultural or otherwise, at any time in the recent past either. To the contrary, Poland has repeatedly been the victim of imperialism.

I definitely agree that there could have easily been a more diverse cast of character, and I'm not saying that they shouldn't have included people of other racial background. I just find it very peculiar that this game in particular is being so criticized for it, when this game is a rare example of a really successful game from a historically marginalized culture and country.

Well, let me give you an example. There are no black people (to my recollection) in the movie Princess Monoke, a film feature a lot of magic and fantasy creatures and so on. To my knowledge, that movie has never been criticized for its lack of diversity. So what is the difference between that and the Witcher 3?

I am basically pretty comfortable with people in other countries making art that is reflective of that country, but not reflective of the United States. I don't feel entitled to tell artists living in another society that their art should conform to my day-to-day experience. Accordingly, I am fine with Japanese people making art that is reflective of Japanese society, Inuit people making art that is reflective of Inuit society, and Polish people making art that is reflective of Polish society.

There pretty much are only Polish people in Poland. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Poland Likewise, I have played a fair number of Japanese games that feature only Japanese people and it's never struck me as something I should be concerned by. There pretty much are only Japanese people in Japan, so I don't really expect Japanese artists to represent people of other ethnicity in their games.

Witcher 3 is so determinedly Polish, though. It's not full of a bunch of generic "white people", it's full of specifically Polish people (or at least that's how it seems to me). I mean, it's a Polish studio making games based on a Polish book series that is itself based on Polish mythology, for what was (at least at first) a primarily Polish audience. If it's OK to "write about what you know" surely it is also OK to make a game about what you know? And it's not like Polish people have had such an easy and privileged time of it both in their home country and in the United States. Both the Nazis and the Soviets committed genocides against the Poles, and Polish people in the United States were also subject to serious racism. I feel like treating this game as "too many white people" is a gross oversimplification. It would be just as unfair to ask to be able to play a Polish person in Never Alone, a game based on Inuit mythology that features an Inuit protagonist.

I started a story mission and most of my characters stopped animating entirely. They kind of just hovered above the ground with their arms and legs splayed to the side, like little ragdolls. I restarted the game without the tweak and the mission started fine. The same thing happened in a later mission and again, restarting without the tweak fixed the problem.

This works but beware! It will cause game-breaking bugs in some story missions. At least it did for me.

Traditionally swords aren't made out of lasers

I am playing this and really enjoying it. I've never really gotten into a lords management game before--I have no real interest in watching videos or reading guides or anything, so I never had the faintest clue what to do in LoL (I never even tried to get into DotA2). HotS is, for the most part, simple enough that I could start playing without feeling like I needed to spend a couple hours researching just to understand what is going on. Coupled to that is the fact that I have at most 20-30 minutes a day to game, which is pretty much exactly the length of a HotS match.